*STS Circle at Harvard* *[image: line.gif] * * * *Anne Pollock * *Georgia Tech* * * on
*Big Pharma Stagnant and Dynamic: Transforming the Critique* ** Monday, December 6th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: line.gif] Lunch is provided if you RSVP. Please RSVP to sts <[email protected]>@hks.harvard.edu<[email protected]> by 5pm Thursday, December 2nd. * * *Abstract:* Intersecting fields of scholarship have accounted for pharmaceutical companies' extraordinary success in promoting and profiting from their wares. This article instead tracks resistances and failures in the terrain of Big Pharma amid economic, epistemological, and political challenges to their business models. Pfizer has been a key player in the rise of Big Pharma, and its fortunes since 2006 provide windows into the industry's stagnation - the failure of Pfizer's would-be blockbuster torcetrapib, the closing of its heart disease research unit, its free drug program for newly unemployed Americans. These illustrate transformations in "least neglected diseases" and in pricing structures, and can be understood in the contexts of both biotech and Global South critique. Biotech companies have remained profitable by creating biologics for niche subsets of rich populations with a high willingness to pay (including lucrative treatments I call "drugs for short lives"). At the same time, dominant global capitalists/philanthropists have brought unprecedented funding to making treatment for AIDS and TB available to the poor and tackling long-neglected diseases like malaria. Now that pharmaceutical profits and markets seem less than infinite in their expansion and philanthropy has been pharmaceuticalized, the stakes of demands like "medicine for people not for profit" are changing. STS critique of pharmaceuticals should take these transformations into account as it deepens its systemic critique of global inequality. *Biography*: Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology and Culture in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech. Trained in the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology & Society at MIT, her research focuses on biomedicine and culture. She is particularly interested in how medical categories and technologies are enrolled in telling stories about identity and difference, especially with regard to race, gender, and citizenship. She is currently revising her book manuscript about the intersecting trajectories of race, pharmaceuticals, and cardiovascular disease in the United States from the founding of cardiology to the commercial failure of BiDil. She is also engaged in two ongoing projects: one about feminism and heart disease, and the other about global pharmaceuticals amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of philanthropy. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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